In China, Huawei is known for offering competitive salaries but also demands a lot from its employees. Many people tolerate the toxic work environment in exchange for financial benefits, particularly as they gradually improve their family's lifestyle with their rising income.
As a successful company, Huawei has also popularized the so-called "Wolf-like Spirit" among other Chinese firms.
The "Wolf-like Spirit" implies an expectation to work extremely hard and do whatever is necessary to achieve the company's goals.
One anecdote involves some Japanese customers who visited ZTE, a competitor of Huawei. To break the deals, Huawei allegedly sent individuals who pretended to be ZTE employees and entertained the customers with drinking and whoring for a week.
No one should trust a company like Huawei. Or any companies with deep CCP connection from China.
Any company with deep financial dependency on the Chinese market (basically all Chinese companies) will have connections with the Chinese Communist party (aka the ruling government), including all Chinese citizens in the country... They will have "deep connection" with the government because all these people and entities are subject to the local laws and established interests and they don't really have an alternative. It's not like the US or the West is so immigration happy welcoming them in with open arms.
As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).
What should they do? Just "cooperate"? No amount of cooperation or action from the Chinese side will get them to be trusted or viewed differently, because the fundamental issue isn't that Huawei is selling backdoored or hacked devices (which they aren't, or otherwise everything would have been ripped out instantly)... it's that they fundamentally do not trust the company, or anything from China.
> As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).
If a company is making ball bearings or bathroom fixtures, you don't have to worry much about their ties as long as they're not your sole supplier. How do you backdoor a manual mechanical valve?
Whereas for anything that has computer code in it, open source down to the microcode or GTFO. Countries will (and should) want to stick to suppliers in the local and allied countries if a foreign one isn't willing to provide that, and have no objections if a country they're doing that to wants to do the same to them.
I know it was an anecdotal example, but a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.
Which goes to show that splitting economic things up into civilian vs. non-civilian is an exercise in futility at the end of it all, and this goes for the West, too.
> a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.
It's not about that. You could say that about doing business with them on anything whatsoever. If you buy their plastic toys they could use the profits to build tanks.
The problem here is that they're giving you a device you're putting in a sensitive place containing opaque binary computer code that could be doing anything, which customers can't feasibly replace with their own or audit because they don't have the source code.
Open source does nothing if you can't verify the shipped code is actually running that. Plus after the whole Supermicro controversy we'd have to check what appear to be ball bearings for embedded spying circuitry.
It is funny, because even foreign experts working in China are expected to join the trade union, although they can’t vote in its elections (not a huge loss). Huawei’s connection to the PLA stands out among Chinese companies, but you are correct that every company in China will have strong ties to the CPC and could have strong involvement by the PLA. They mostly don’t, however, the government isn’t that well organized outside if just governing, and China’s corporate scene is very chaotic. A lot of it is just a hyper competitive market that turns them a certain way.
Well, Nortel had a former US Navy Admiral as CEO at some point.
Deep links between government and large companies exist in every country whether acknowledged or not.
In Huawei's case, frankly the issue was that it was the first time a company not in the West's control became a major player in a strategic industry. Alleged CCP/PLA links are just part of the narrative built against them but the issue was more general.
I think it’s related to Huawei’s PLA roots. Its founder spent an 11 year career in the PLA. It is not clear about huawei’s ownership structure outside that it is kind of owned by employees, but not really.
PLA in the past is basically a career choice for people from rural area. You get sponsored for education, and will get a job in the city after you quit the army. Most of my childhood friends served in the army before they got their jobs, because they sucked in school. That was the only choice for them.
Sure. He is older than me, I don't know what was the policy then.
My friends weren't from villages, their parents work in state owned entities, in order to get a position in these big state companies, you have to either have good education or being offered a job after military. In the past, the government must offer a job to people out of military. The most common reason for people to go into military is to have a job in the future. This applies to both city and villages. However, with the reduction of the army, this has changed. Now you get paid a good salary while in military, but you don't automatically get a job.
If you study well, but you cannot afford school, you can also go to military universities, where your expenses is paid, but you will have to work in the military for a fix number of years afterward.
Wait until the world finds out that most Israeli tech founders have roots in Unit 8200 ;) And a lot of US companies were founded through known CIA fronts.
Military roots or no, in the end every company must obey the laws of the country they’re founded first and foremost, and then try not to break the laws of the countries they operate in. This is the reality. Just like AT&T can be compelled to spy on X, Y; so can any other company be compelled by their government.
And this idea that western spying is good and Chinese spying is bad… its ludricuous. Spying is just bad.
It isn’t that Chinese spying is somehow less virtuous than American spying, it’s more why take the chance? The only reason China ever bothered with Cisco or Nortell at all was to copy their tech, but China wouldn’t let an overseas tech come in today to drive their cellphone network today. They would think that’s just stupid. But when America does the same they cry bloody murder.
Well, US has zero domestic 5G equipment manufacturers. So it is not really a question of China managing US mobile networks.
And Nokia/Ericsson/Samsung could have won the 5G core bids if the pricing structure and/or features were better than Huawei’s.
Not defending Huawei, but considering how the US market works… they won pretty fairly.
In the end customers will pay the price of “China bad”. And most likely tax payers for all the subsidies governments will telcos to remove Huawei equipment from their networks.
Good point.
Besides, there is no detailed guidebook on censorship in China.
Every organization (media, social media) has to guess what the gov wants to censor.
As a result, every organization tends to overdo it. Because 1). you never know if you miss one target that should be censored and 2). What is OK today might not be OK tomorrow.
Censorship in China is an art (or joke).
Chinese IP are not allowed to use ChatGPT.
Chinese credit card is not allowed for OpenAI API.
Source: my own experience.
What puzzles me most is the second restriction. My credit card is accepted by AWS, Google, and many other services. It is also accepted by many services which use Stripe to process payments.
Perhaps they are unwilling to operate in a territory where they would be required to disclose every user's chat history to the government, which has potentially severe implications for certain groups of users and also for OpenAI's competitive interests.
> Chinese credit card is not allowed for OpenAI API.
A lot of online services don't accept Chinese credit cards, hosting providers for instance, so I don't think that is specific to OpenAI. The reason usually given for this is excessive chargebacks of (in the case of hosting) TOS violations like sending junk mail (followed by a charge-back when this is blocked). It sounds a like collective punishment a little: while I don't doubt that there are a lot of problem users coming from China, with such a large population that doesn't indicate that any majority of users from the region are a problem. I can see the commercial PoV though: if the majority of charge-back issues and related problems come from a particular region and you get very few genuine costumers from there¹ then blocking the area is a net gain despite potentially losing customers.
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[1] due to preferring local variants (for reasons of just wanting to support local, due to local resources having lower latency, due to your service being blocked by something like the GFW, local services being in their language, any/all the above and more)
It's definitely not a commercial thing but political.
I'm located in Hong Kong and using Hong Kong credit cards have never been a problem with online merchants. I don't think Hong Kong credit cards are particularly bad with chargebacks or whatever. OpenAI has explicitly blocked Hong Kong (and China). Hong Kong and China, together with other "US adversaries" like Iran, N. Korea, etc are not on OpenAI's supported countries list.
If you have been paying attention, you'll know that US policy makers are worried that Chinese access to AI technology will pose a security risk to the US. This is just one instance of these AI technology restrictions. Ineffectual of course given the many ways to workaround them, but it is what it is.
I don't understand, if ChatGPT is blocked by the firewall, how do you know that ChatGPT is blocking IPs in return? Are there chinese IP ranges that are not affected by censorship that a citizen can use?
Okay but the point is that ChatGPT is blocked by the firewall.
EDIT: I read the comment below about Hong Kong, but I can't reply because I'm typing too fast by HN standards, so I'm writing it here and yolo: "I'm from Italy and I remember when ChatGPT was blocked here after the Garante della Privacy complaint, of course the site wasn't blocked by Italy but OpenAI complies with local obligations, so maybe it could be a reason about the block. API were also not blocked in Italy."
EDIT 2: if the website is not actually blocked (the websites that check if a website is reachable by mainland China lied to me) then I guess they are just complying to local regulations so that the entire website does not get blocked.
it's not blocked by the firewall. i'm in china and i can load openai's website and chatgpt just fine. openai just blocks me from accessing chatgpt or signing up for an account unless i use a VPN and US based phone number for signup
as in, if i open chat.openai.com in my browser without a VPN, from behind the firewall, i get an openai error message that says "Unable to load site" with the openai logo on screen
if the firewall blocks something the page just doesn't load at all and the connection times out
In so far as Hong Kong IPs are "Chinese IPs", we can access OpenAI's website, but their signup and login pages blocks Hong Kong phone numbers, credit cards and IP addresses.
Curiously, the OpenAI API endpoints works flawlessly with Hong Kong IP addresses as long as you have a working API key.
ChatGPT was not blocked by the GFW when it first released for a few weeks (if not months, I don't remember), but at that time OpenAI already blocked China.
The geo check only happened once during login at that time, with a very clear message that it's "not available in your region". Once you are logged in with a proxy you can turn off your proxy/VPN/whatever and use ChatGPT just fine.
context: at Ti8's final, Team LGD played against Team OG. During the draft phase, OG players had some paper, which were statistics of LGD (I guess).
Somnus the player said: Ceb is holding a bunch of paper. https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15.
In that final, LGD almost won but they lost at the end. That final is arguably the best final in Dota2 history.
The moment when Somuns taunted OG was captured by True Sight, which is a documentary for every TI final. LGD players surely watched the documentary or at least the clip many times.
The first clip you questioned about is from Ti9, a year after Ti8, where OG and LGD played again.
Notail the player took a bunch of paper (way too many for drafting analysis purpose) to remind LGD their tragic loss last year.
Hence the mind game. Btw, LGD lost again.
Thanks! Check the Spoken Word category? I will also add YouTube etc. And I'm thinking on this, what else I can do... I love shadowing, it's my favorite way to learn.
Before ChatGPT I spent around 200 usd per month to practice German with German native speakers for 2 months.
Then I use ChatGPT to practice German and I am very happy about the experience. AI can't replace real human yet. But I'm already willing to practice with ChatGPT given my current use case and my budget. It's not 10x better, but 20x cheaper. From my experience, AI is not hype.
Imagine integrating a more fine tuned AI and text-to-speech feature to make a better AI teacher. Such an app already exists, I believe. I'm waiting for a German and Japanese one.
This is a great example of a concrete use case. It is well known that tutors are far more effective than generalized learning, and everybody’s anecdotal experience is that immersion is the best way to learn a language (suggesting that the interactive effect of tutors is at least as strong in this domain)
A quick Duck Duck Go search suggests that capturing just a fraction of this market is worth >>$1B. To me that feels categorically different than crypto, even if a few grifters are also adding froth to the space.
Where did you find these German native speakers to practice with? And you said "such an app already exists", but not for German and Japanese. Do you know the name? I have a lot of experience building language learning services so am very curious to hear what you feel is currently missing in your current tools to learn German/Japanese.
What I don't like about a real tutor is because it's expensive and I have to book in advance.
ChaptGPT is free and I can practice with it whenever I want. Besides, ChaptGPT is not a real human so I don't feel embaraced when I made stupid mistake.
How much does it currently cost you (per session) to book someone on iTalki?
And which would you prefer: a cheaper, on-demand version of iTalki (you get matched with someone already online versus booking in advance), or an AI-based app/service that you can chat back-and-forth with whenever you want?
I pay $15 to $20 per session (around 45 ~ 60 mins), depending on teachers.
The problem with matching with someone already online is that it might not be the right person. There are tutors that are very good, helpful and inspiring. I don't think I want to talk to random person online. A long term relationship with several tutors are helpful because we know each other better and I'm more comfortable speaking in front of them.
I have a child and is going to have another one this year. I have this crazy idea that is big if true but 99.9% it would fail. I would totally do it if I was without a family. This idea is VC type idea.
Now I am working on some idea that is 99% going to feed my family but it is boring as hell and no VC would look at it.
I want to solve the problem that it's difficult for people to predict the future with skin in the game.
My idea is to create a prediction market where people bet on REAL world events under REAL name with FAKE money. All predictions are public and we can rank every user's prediction ability in each category by his ROI.
I have created a MVP where people bet on cryptos: https://rankvestor.com/. I wanted to start with finantial market.
Now I have to stop this project because I am moving my family to Japan because I don't believe in the future of China. I have to work for a Japan company to keep my visa. In my spare time, I work on a Japanese study app that gives me some money every month.
BTW, if anyone likes this idea, feel free to take it and implement it :)
> no one will be going out of business just because their frontend isn't React
Yes.
But one is more likely to go out of business if their frontend is still using JQuery. It's harder to maintain and iterate, harder to recruite good engineers.
I would ask for more money if the company hiring me uses JQuery and doesn't use TypeScript/React. And if the company somehow hires me, I would be less productive because I can't use TypeScript and a modern framework.
What if they use typescript/Vue? I work for a fortune 100 company that uses Vue. We have found that people familiar with react can pick up Vue very quickly. That hardly seems like a reason to ask for more money.
My experience with True React Frontenders is opposite, except for more money nuance. I don’t even feel that “no one will be going out of business” vibe, really (but that must depend on a type of a business).
As a successful company, Huawei has also popularized the so-called "Wolf-like Spirit" among other Chinese firms.
The "Wolf-like Spirit" implies an expectation to work extremely hard and do whatever is necessary to achieve the company's goals.
One anecdote involves some Japanese customers who visited ZTE, a competitor of Huawei. To break the deals, Huawei allegedly sent individuals who pretended to be ZTE employees and entertained the customers with drinking and whoring for a week.
No one should trust a company like Huawei. Or any companies with deep CCP connection from China.